


A Negative Integer

by racketghost



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Anal Sex, Divinity Kink, First Times, Love Confessions, M/M, Pain play but not for masochistic reasons, condoms are sexy, kink meme for a friend, my medical kink crept in I'm SORRY, sexy latex glove rights, superkink salad, there is no reason for any of this, when you're a demon and your beloved is an angel sometimes they give you hives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-11
Updated: 2020-05-11
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:40:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24131464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/racketghost/pseuds/racketghost
Summary: “I’mthe holy object,” Aziraphale says, and is also looking frantically around the room, the bookshop, the skylight filtering in the first glimpses of afternoon sun and holding dust particles suspended in their beams, dreamy and soft. “I can’t touch you.”“Yes you can,” he blurts out, and swallows down the cacophony of what are sure to be any number of embarrassing and hopeful ways in which the angel can touch him,really, whenever.
Relationships: Aziraphale & Crowley (Good Omens), Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 141
Kudos: 796
Collections: Courts GO Re-Reads, Crowley's Demonic Side, Prom 2020





	A Negative Integer

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rfsmiley](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rfsmiley/gifts).



> I asked my darling friend RFSmiley if I could write her a smutty one-shot. The result is this nearly 11k word behemoth that went off the tracks.

There is still a mark on his hand.

Just a faint red crosshatch of inflamed skin across the palm from a strongand unprompted handhold, not enough to blister. Not anymore.

He closes his fingers around it and hitches in an inhale as it burns, sensitive to the touch, savoring the ache. He does not know how long this one will last— if it will be like the others— the earlier ones. In the months following after Armageddon the touches themselves had waned and so too had their marks on him. An ebb in their duration corresponding perhaps to how long they had been on earth together. A potential dismantling of the thing that makes him demonic, the thing that makes Aziraphale angelic.

Or it is perhaps a tolerance, he thinks, flexing the hand beneath the tablecloth, an endurance— like a heart that burns under exertion and grows stronger through the strain.

He can remember the first time— on a wall in Eden— how there had been a spectacular inflammation of approximately all of his skin, beginning with the shoulder where Aziraphale’s wing tip had touched down, blossoming out like a red tide.

He had lain himself down in the Garden afterwards and had counted the leaves on the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, had tried to quell the furious racing of his heart. He had been able to feel the tide of his blood migrating to a place between his legs that he had never truly considered let alone touched, had been able to feel that noisy organ in his chest doing something that had felt like somersaults.

He had not understood what he felt. Had not been able to quantify any reaction he’d experienced towards that strange and remarkable angel except for that very visceral one of his skin.

An allergy made sense, he had thought. Repulsions are the kind of thing he cut his demonic teeth on. His skin flaring hot had felt _right_ even as the rest of him felt wrong— his heartbeat too fast, his stomach curling into knots, a feeling of wriggling insects somewhere where his lungs might be.

He had later found a plant with insides that soothed the burn and had rubbed himself in their flesh, had later scraped it all off in a fit of regret that he can still find flaring hot beneath his skin nearly six-thousand years later. He had not been able to understand _that_ reaction either.

And then, in Mesopotamia— there had been a light brushing of the back of an angelic hand across his clothed arm— a burn that singed down through the rough linen fibers and scorched a vaguely rectangular shape into his skin that had persisted for weeks. He had by then grown accustomed to the anatomy he came equipped with and had put it to work out in the desert at night, under a full canopy of stars, pressing on the outline of Aziraphale’s hand to make it last. He had not tried to quell the burn. Not that time. Not ever again.

There had been a great stretch of time after the flood, an antediluvian vacancy that had carved out great and desperate chunks from the place where he assumed he bore a heart. He had spent time then grinding his teeth and staring at the sky, the firmament, wondering if that strange and remarkable angel had returned to that place he had been banished from, wondering if that strange and remarkable angel ever thought of him at all.

To see him decades later, standing solitary at the crucifixion of the son of God Herself, had felt something like being shot in the heart with an arrow. They had not touched then. But later that night, fucking his own fist, he had burned as if they had.

By the time they had run into each other in a cantina in Rome, Crowley had been without that magnificent and terrible ache for what felt like a millennia. He had to make do with pressing himself against crucifixes, sitting on bibles, wrapping rosary beads around certain areas of his anatomy.

He had tried to quench himself with masturbatory habits that were less profane in nature— tried to train himself to enjoy pleasure on its own terms— simple digital penetrations, gently lubricated hands, fantasies that included bedding an angel without pain on a carpet of cool moss, flowers opening around them.

And every time he had tried he had failed. Spectacularly. The agony of their first meeting had been etched irrevocably into his flesh along with Aziraphale’s name so much so that it had always devolved into frantic and ever more violent grips, fingers digging in, teeth biting into his lip or turning to chew at his own shoulder. It had always been too _soft_ , too _sweet_ , too _gentle_. He had reasoned with himself that he is a _demon_ — he is not _desirous_ of soft things. He likes sharp things, strong things, _terrifying_ things.

And _this_ , he thinks, with a fury that defies the softness in his voice, the gentleness of his gaze, this _angel_ with his waistcoat and cotton-tuft hair is the frustratingly sharp, strong, terrifying thing he wants most. Even buttoned up and proper and currently drinking with his ring-clad pinkie finger sticking out Aziraphale manages to hold within him something horrifyingly sharp, something superheated and elemental.

Something that makes Crowley’s toes curl just looking at him, makes his heart thump loudly in his ears.

Something he aches for with an unconditionality that burns him in equal measure.

“Are you certain you are not thirsty, my dear?”

Crowley squeezes his hand again, huffs out a single strained breath.

“No.”

Aziraphale is looking at him oddly, concerned maybe, or reproachful.

“Are you quite alright?”

Crowley blinks and straightens his glasses, tries to clear his throat.

“Yeah. ‘Course.”

“Only you just seem— oh, my dear well you look a bit dewy about the temples and—“

Crowley pulls his glasses off and wipes a hand across his forehead, sucks in a pained breath as the burnt line of his palm abrades itself on his own skin. He tries to shelter the motion and shoves his sunglasses back on, leans back jerkily in the chair.

“It’s just— it’s a bit _warm_ in here, innit?”

It is April in London and the sky is deeply overcast, there is nothing warm about where they are.

“I never thought I’d hear _you_ grouse about the heat,” Aziraphale says primly, still eyeing Crowley with a faint edge of unease.

“First time for everything,” he mumbles.

“Would you care to join me at the bookshop? I have some cataloguing to do and a lovely bottle of wine chilling, it might help to cool you down.”

Crowley flexes his hand and then his jaw, nods tightly.

“Sure. Yeah. Sounds good.”

He uses the raw meat of his hand on the push plate of the cafe door, then again, later, to open the bottle of wine. It aches and catches in his throat, makes his pulse burn hotly in his neck.

“I am still a bit appalled at how our dear Antichrist chose to arrange these titles,” Aziraphale is saying, fretting over a particularly wily order of books on one of the lower shelves. “Why on _earth_ would he put literary fiction next to my misprinted bibles?”

“If the shoe fits,” Crowley says, and makes the grievous mistake of passing Aziraphale a glass of wine, palm up.

“Yes, well some of the misquotations are rather— _oh_.”

Aziraphale stops, stares at Crowley’s skin.

“What?”

“My dear boy, what ever happened to your hand?”

The wine glass is lifted from between his fingers and there are suddenly Aziraphale’s perfect holy hands holding his, cupping it gently.

He nearly lifts out of his skin.

“Oh, ah, nothing.”

Those fingertips pressing into the back of his palm are making it wonderfully difficult to breathe, he can feel his eyes threatening to roll back, his toes curling on their own volition. It is the remarkable chilled heat of boiling water, the quench of a fire that is so hot it blanks out nerve endings, shuts them entirely down.

Aziraphale presses a curious finger to the already raw skin and Crowley yanks his hand back, tries to swallow down his moan into a sound that he hopes seems pained and not aroused.

“Just a burn,” he manages.

“Oh dear, my apologies— I didn’t realize it was a burn I thought perhaps—“

Aziraphale pauses. Blinks.

Crowley cradles his hand up to his chest and hopes desperately that there are marks on the back of his hand, something for later.

“ _What_?” He snaps, feeling all together too undressed by Aziraphale’s perceptive gaze.

“How can you have a burn you are impervious to fire I don’t—“

Aziraphale glances over and down to the misprinted bibles, the only ones in the bookshop that are not held safely and ridiculously behind glass partitions— in the off-chance that Crowley ever skim his fingertips over the spines and touch one.

“Did you touch a holy book? A crucifix, perhaps? Oh and just this morning I grabbed you there I must’ve—“

Aziraphale stops himself, sways a bit on his feet. His pale eyebrows pull together.

“ _Oh_.”

He looks back, his eyes soft and his face soft and then glances down at his own strong, square hands, turns them to inspect the palms.

“Is it me?”

Crowley can feel his pulse in the roof of his mouth, his shoulders hitching up to his ears. He says nothing.

“ _Oh_ ,” he says again, with considerably more gravitas. And Crowley doesn’t want to see it— he can’t bear to feel this again— not that face and not that voice, the one that had told him not too tremendously long ago that _no_ _we’re not friends_ , and _no I’m not following you to Alpha Centauri_ and _no, that’s it, it’s over_.

“Aziraphale.” He says his name but does not know how to follow it.

“It _is_ me,” Aziraphale repeats, in the affirmative this time, smoothing his hands suddenly down his waistcoat— a motion that is so familiar and so practiced, so unconsciously endearing that Crowley pulls his gaze away to something else, _anything else_ lest he… lest he—

“No,” he lies. “It’s fine.”

“ _I’m_ the holy object,” Aziraphale says, and is also looking frantically around the room, the bookshop, the skylight filtering in the first glimpses of afternoon sun and holding dust particles suspended in their beams, dreamy and soft. “I can’t touch you.”

“Yes you can,” he blurts out, and swallows down the cacophony of what are sure to be any number of embarrassing and hopeful ways in which the angel can touch him, _really_ , _whenever._

“I— I hurt you,” Aziraphale says, and curls those angelic hands into angelic fists. “I _hurt_ you,” he repeats.

“No, it’s— it’s _fine_ ,” Crowley manages, and tries to clear his throat, to remember what it feels like to breathe.

“Have I always? When did you know?”

His eyes are glassy, nearly green.

Crowley shrugs, shifts, can’t seem to speak.

“Uh— yeah, you know, a _while_.”

“Has it always?” Aziraphale asks, and is looking at his hands again. “Left a mark?”

“Yeah,” he breathes, and then tries to smile, flash some teeth. “These are a bit disappointing though, really. They used to be _huge_.”

The joke, he realizes, is a bad one as soon as it leaves his mouth.

“ _When_?” Aziraphale asks, with a increasing sort of frantic energy.

“I mean— always. Eden.”

“I didn’t touch you in Eden,” he says hotly, hushed.

And Crowley knows he doesn’t mean in it to sound harsh but it _does_ to his ears anyway— that Aziraphale might not remember that single feather brushing across his shoulder, that he very obviously does not know how Crowley had spent a number of empty, self-pleasured evenings with his own hand and a palmful of memories, the ghost of a burn on his shoulder.

“You did,” Crowley says softly. “Your wing.”

“And it— it _hurt_ you.”

It is not a question but Crowley answers it anyway.

“Yes.”

Aziraphale turns away from him, paces into another room, shrugs out of his coat.

“Angel,” Crowley says, following after him. “It’s not a big deal. Really.”

Out of his coat Aziraphale’s back becomes bisected into simple strong shapes, tan torso, blue arms.

“I’m a… a _danger_ to you,” Aziraphale says, not turning around.

Crowley scoffs.

“A bit late for that kind of talk, isn’t it? How long have we been friends?”

Aziraphale appears frozen in place in front of him, his head tilted shyly down.

“It’s not as though this changes anything,” Crowley continues, swallowing. “Between us.”

Aziraphale’s head turns and Crowley can see the sharp point of his profile, the soft jut of his lip, that most stubborn of chins.

“Does it not?” Aziraphale asks simply, his face carefully blank.

He feels all at once disarmed, unsteady. As if they had been having two separate but increasingly converging conversations and he had not realized it until just this moment. He does not know how to proceed.

“Why would it?” He asks honestly, shoving his hands into his too-small pockets and endeavoring not to wince.

Aziraphale glances up at him, at his face, as if searching for something there— some clue he does not have.

“I—“

Something shutters itself in Aziraphale’s face and then opens again, buoyed up by the wine from lunch perhaps or the strange intimacy of this conversation, a revelation about a six-thousand year friendship that he had only just realized.

“I rather hoped that— that in the future I might find myself presented with more…” Aziraphale trails off and looks pointedly away, “—more chances to do so. What with the end of the world business handled and both of us lacking direct supervision from our superiors.”

Crowley’s jaw feels wired shut. He does not know how to stand, how legs work, wonders about the abstract idea of feet.

“You wanted—“ He tries his voice and it cracks itself in half like an egg, vowels come spilling out behind it like a yolk, “—uh, _opportunities_ to touch me?”

Aziraphale is very obviously not looking at him, fixated instead on a particular shelf somewhere to the left of Crowley’s head.

“Well it— it seemed to be a natural progression of our… _relationship_ that we would—“ He stops, licks his lips, visibly swallows, “—find ourselves in more intimate moments which may include casual touching.”

Those hands fiddle with his waistcoat again, brush against the threadbare edges.

“Casual touching,” Crowley repeats, and finds himself leaning imperceptibly forward, as if by doing so he might find himself understanding exactly all of Aziraphale’s subliminal meanings.

“Oh, for—“ Aziraphale starts hotly, then inhales, closes his eyes. He opens them and exhales and begins again, only minutely calmer, “—for _someone’s sake_ , you idiot, you know what I’m implying.”

For all the times he had ever imagined such a scenario he had never quite nailed down how Aziraphale would approach it. It feels like getting very fondly run over by a rather large lorry.

“Yeah,” Crowley says, and leans back into the wall because he is fairly certain his legs are about to give out. “Just wanted to hear you say it.”

That fair head turns to look at him for the first time in what feels like ages.

“Well, perhaps it’s for the best that I don’t,” he says, and there is the attempt at a smile that quickly sheaths itself behind something like sadness. “Considering the circumstances.”

He wants to laugh perhaps, or cry. Do something that will mitigate the frothing and increasingly desperate emotion that is bottled inside of him. Something to vent the steam.

He flexes his hand again and the ache is gone, the burn has subsided. A thread of panic at the idea of Aziraphale never touching him again rises up out of him, traces through his veins.

He pulls his hand out of his pocket and looks at it, wonders if that mark had been his last. The crosshatches are gone.

“I don’t mind it,” he bites out, and closes his eyes, curling his hand back into a fist. “The marks— the pain— _any_ _of it_.”

He does not want to open his eyes but it is so silent in the bookshop that he can hear humans outside walking along the pavement, the sound of his own voice seems to hang in the air. He opens them.

“You don’t mind it,” Aziraphale says slowly.

Crowley’s throat feels stamped shut. He tries to clear it.

“I don’t.”

“How _much_ don’t you mind it?”

If he did not know Aziraphale better he would say the angel is being a right bastard and would excuse himself from the bookshop, take himself out for a drink.

“It’s a negative integer.”

Aziraphale’s eyes go briefly wide, his eyebrows lift themselves into his hairline.

“ _Oh_ ,” he says. “I see.”

“Yeah,” Crowley says, breathless. “So, it’s not a problem.”

He bites down so hard he imagines he can hear his molars crack. His heart feels like it is beating outside of himself.

“It’s— I mean— in that case perhaps we might have our wine and— and continue our day. I should get back to work.”

Aziraphale pulls down on the edges of his shirtsleeves as if they aren’t already perfectly straight, pressed crisp.

Crowley’s heart, for all it was just beating on the outside of his chest a moment ago, seems to have plummeted into his shoes. His temper flares.

“So I tell you I’m hot for your ever-so-holy hands and you want to go back to book organizing?”

Aziraphale seems to shift on his feet in discomfort.

“If you must know you insufferable demon I was fully planning on perhaps shaking your hand goodbye whenever you left.”

“A _handshake_ ,” Crowley repeats, and then pushes up off the wall. He has half a mind of leaving— heading back out and they can sort all of this out later. He can go home and angrily shower and pretend like the mark on his hand is still there.

“Wait—“

He stops in the foyer, between those marble columns, scuffs his feet over the scrubbed lines of Aziraphale’s one-time summoning circle.

He can feel the energy of it even through his shoes and he takes a step back.

“Perhaps— perhaps I was planning on more than just a handshake,” Aziraphale say shyly, wringing his hands together in front of him. “Depending on how much wine I consume.”

“So you have to get _drunk_ first?”

“That is not what I was implying only that I— that we— I don’t know how this works, really.”

Aziraphale is studying his hands in front of him, twisting the pinkie ring.

“Neither do I,” Crowley says truthfully. And he doesn’t, in part, because he does not know whether Aziraphale is after sex or something else, if what they currently are is enough to satisfy him. Crowley knows only that he aches with a want that is soothed by a singular corresponding burn. A binary pain that matches and erases his own.

Crowley swallows and turns his head. He looks at the ancient gramophone, the vinyl records, the books that are exceedingly old. Aziraphale is a slowly evolving creature, he thinks, and he endeavors to be more patient. “But maybe we could have a drink and figure it out together.”

“Yes,” Aziraphale breathes. “I— I think I’d enjoy that.”

“Come on,” he says, and nearly reaches out a hand for Aziraphale to take. “Let me get you some wine.”

They find Aziraphale’s abandoned glass somewhere amidst the clutter and wind their way back to the sofa, the back room. Crowley hesitates and pulls off his sunglasses, tosses them skittering across the coffee table, feeling like a skinned animal.

Aziraphale seats himself delicately at the opposite end of the sofa— a win, Crowley counts, because he typically sits across from him on a chair.

“Eden,” Aziraphale says. “I’m sorry about that.”

“Don’t be,” Crowley says, remembering how tiny red welts had risen up out of his skin and how he had not minded them. He deserved them, perhaps. For sins not yet committed.

“I was… endeavoring to keep you dry,” Aziraphale explains, as if he has to.

“I know.”

They feel like magnets, Crowley thinks, held at just the right distance to repel. The calculated space between them somehow wounds far greater than the pain of Aziraphale’s touch.

But Crowley pours the wine when Aziraphale’s glass gets low and he keeps the conversation cordial. He tries not to reach for his sunglasses. He tries to keep his leg from shaking.

“When else?” Aziraphale eventually asks.

Crowley exhales into the ceiling and lets his eyes climb up the shelf in front of him. He gets stuck somewhere on Huxley.

“Rome was a good one.”

“Petronius’ place?” Aziraphale asks, and seems to settle into the back of the sofa in reminiscence.

“Yeah,” Crowley says. “You made me try oysters.”

“I _did_.”

“I was very sick afterwards.”

“ _Oh_. I’m very sorry.”

“I’d do it all over again, you know.”

He glances over and catches the loveliest opening blush on Aziraphale’s cheeks, across the nose and spilling into his rather oversized ears.

“Did it leave a mark?” Aziraphale asks. “That time?”

“It did,” he says, and rubs absently at his chin. “Left a scar actually. The only one that did.”

“A _scar_?”

He hums and tilts his head back, revealing a perfect semi-circle of white scar tissue beneath his chin, the imprint perhaps of an angelic finger that had cupped there.

“First time you touched my face.”

He watches the blood drain abruptly from Aziraphale’s cheeks.

Aziraphale had perhaps had too much to drink that night, too much house brown. He had been altogether more handsy than ever— wriggled in close around a tiny stone table, continually brushing against Crowley’s fingertips. He had at one point hooked a finger beneath Crowley’s jaw and assisted in tilting his head back, to demonstrate the proper method for sliding oysters out of their shell.

Crowley had never been quite sure whether his violent heaving later had been the result of shellfish that had gone off in a stomach unaccustomed to eating at all, or simply an overdrive of his body systems from an angelic allergy.

“I’m so sorry,” Aziraphale says, and looks stricken with something like grief.

“Don’t apologize.”

He is not sure how to express that he enjoys the angel’s marks on him, that his tolerance to whatever this proximity impresses on him is a negative as much as it is a positive.

“I’ve— I’ve touched your face since then,” Aziraphale says. “But I don’t see any more scars.”

“It’s gotten weaker,” he says. “Or I’m just getting used to it.”

“ _Weaker_ ,” Aziraphale repeats. “You mean you’re… building up a tolerance?”

“Maybe,” he muses, and shrugs.

“So maybe someday it won’t happen,” Aziraphale says, and sounds heartbreakingly hopeful.

“Maybe,” Crowley repeats, and offers up a smile in spite of his own dread. He’ll take Aziraphale’s touch without teeth if it means having Aziraphale’s touch at all.

There’s a shift and a small wiggle and then the distance between them shortens. A hand slides out across the damask fabric of the blanket.

Crowley stares at it for a breathless minute and then slides his own hand out, lets their fingertips nearly kiss.

“Do you feel that?” He asks, because there is the buzzing of an electrical current running off of Aziraphale’s fingertips and lacing up into his own.

“No,” Aziraphale says, and slides himself closer.

“I can’t believe you don’t feel this,” Crowley murmurs, wondering wildly if this was the true cost of his fall. The actual punishment.

“It really— you actually _like_ it?” Aziraphale’s hand hovers over Crowley’s, the fingertips grazing the knuckles.

“Yeah,” he breathes. “I do.”

“What does it feel like?”

The fingertips float their way up his wrist, electricity arcing between them.

“Hard to describe. It burns but it’s not _hot_. Feels sharp kinda.”

“It’s painful,” Aziraphale reminds him.

“It is but it’s— it’s _enjoyable_.”

He turns his hand over so that Aziraphale can trace along the lines on his palm, the head line, the heart line, the life line. They flare pink under his touch.

“I’ve always—“ he starts, then stops.

“Always what?” Aziraphale says softly, not looking up. “Tell me.”

“Always wondered if different parts of you would— would feel different.”

Aziraphale stops his tracing and looks up, pupils blown wide.

“You mean if— like if my elbow will hurt you as much as my hand?”

The corner of Crowley’s mouth is incorrigible. It lifts of its own volition.

“I wasn’t exactly thinking of your elbow, but yeah.”

He watches the blush appear across Aziraphale’s cheeks like a magic trick.

“Well I suppose we could try some things out,” he says, and licks his lip.

“Perhaps it will function like… like exposure therapy.”

“Exposure therapy,” Crowley repeats, and the opposite corner of his mouth lifts too.

He watches Aziraphale’s hands as they fuss with his cuffs, then roll back the fabric to reveal pale skin, platinum blond hairs, a dusting of freckles. Crowley’s heart throws itself against his ribs.

“May I?” Aziraphale asks, and holds his arm out between them.

“Yeah,” Crowley says, swallowing. “You don’t have to ask, angel.”

There’s a heat that registers in Aziraphale’s eyes at the nickname, a look that burns with the same intensity as his touch.

And then that arm is getting pressed lightly to his own, just enough that there is a humming ache, like the low frequency of an electrical appliance that has been plugged in too long.

“Not too bad,” Crowley croaks. “Barely anything.”

“What about—“

Aziraphale unbuttons his waistcoat, hesitates, then pulls at his bowtie, unravelling it, unbuttons the collar of his shirt.

The hollow of his throat is revealed suddenly and Crowley isn’t sure what to do about it, unable to stop staring at the way Aziraphale’s pulse gets caught there, the tympanic rhythm of it against his skin.

“Would you?” He is asking, as if Crowley would ever be unwilling to press his hands against that very top of the angel’s chest, as if he has not dreamed about such an offer for too many years to count.

Crowley can’t quite get his throat to work so he lifts a hand in silent acquiescence, lets it linger over the pale skin between Aziraphale’s collarbones.

That stretched drum of skin between them pulses a bit faster as his hand hovers near it, and then Crowley leans in, presses his palm over that beating heart.

His eyes roll back, his toes curl in his shoes. He attempts to stifle a moan and is only partially successful. The current of Aziraphale’s skin races through him— up his arm and down his chest, settles between his thighs.

Aziraphale pulls away from him, shocked.

“Are you—“ there are hands coming up and grabbing at his arms, steadying him, and then releasing at the sudden grip of Crowley’s muscles, assaulted by another wave of angelic touch.

“M’fine,” he manages, finally. “Better than fine.” He leans back and tosses a hand over his head, breathes up into the ceiling. “Please tell me you’re okay with this.”

It is silent for a beat and Crowley rolls his head over, pulls his arm back to see Aziraphale fretting at the rest of his buttons, looking nervously down at his hands.

“It’s… a rather heady experience,” he says finally, peering up, “getting such a reaction out of you.”

“You can tell me if you don’t— if you’re not— if you want to stop I’m okay with it,” Crowley settles on, not sure he likes the hesitation in Aziraphale’s eyes, the way he has not been able to articulate whether he enjoys this or not.

“I don’t,” he says quickly. “Wish to stop. But I would— I would very much like it if you were to remove your shirt.”

 _Oh_.

“Sure,” Crowley breathes. “My shirt. Right.”

He steels himself, surprisingly nervous, and pulls it over his head.

Aziraphale is flexing his fingers, staring a bit at his belly, that soft part just beneath his navel.

“What?” Crowley asks, feeling naked in a way he never has before.

“I would very much like to touch you,” he says, as if that isn’t everything Crowley has ever wanted to hear. “But I can’t… _bear_ the thought of hurting you. Leaving a mark.” He frets at his bottom lip.

“Exposure therapy,” Crowley reminds him. “And besides, you’re not a doctor.” He sucks at his teeth. “You didn’t take some— some Hippocratic oath.”

“I’m an _angel_.” Aziraphale sounds personally affronted.

“And _just enough_ of a bastard,” Crowley reminds him fondly.

Aziraphale looks up at him through his eyelashes, reminiscing perhaps about their first meal post-Armageddon, that hand clasp in the park that had left Crowley breathless and flexing his palm, barely restraining himself. 

“I’m no doctor but,” Aziraphale looks around, his eyes alight. “I do have an idea,” he finishes, and lifts himself up off the sofa.

Crowley watches as Aziraphale disappears into the next room, listens as desk drawers are opened, slid shut.

He arrives back with something clutched in his hands, something pale blue and rubber and—

“Why do you have those?” Crowley asks, staring at the gloves and trying desperately not to think about what it might feel like to have those inside him, encasing Aziraphale’s fingers.

“For handling antiquities,” he says, and does not sit down. “I thought— perhaps we might—“

He twists the gloves in his hands and shifts, as if suddenly uncertain or aware that he had just given himself away, a flush rising up from the opened collar of his shirt and straight to his face. Crowley can’t seem to breathe around the furious beating of his heart, waiting for Aziraphale’s aborted thoughts.

He realizes they aren’t about to reappear and takes pity on him, figures that one of them, at least, should be bold.

He licks his lips, swallows, tries to muster some courage.

“Maybe you could show me your bedroom,” Crowley says slowly, surprised at the evenness of his own voice.

“Yes,” Aziraphale says, emboldened perhaps by propriety. “Yes, of course. Much more comfortable than this old sofa, I’d say.”

Aziraphale reaches out a hand and then rescinds it, pulls it back.

“Follow me?” He asks, as if Crowley does not know his way to the winding spiral staircase, as if he hasn’t traversed it in reality and also in his dreams. He has never felt more naked than he does now, ascending each step shirtless in Aziraphale’s impossibly formal shop, his _home_.

There is a tiny room at the top of the stairs, a narrow landing, a tiny slip of Persian carpet. A skylight above his head shows off a peek of still mostly overcast sky but there is an idea of sun behind them, a promise for later.

He watches Aziraphale step into the bedroom, looking impossibly naked himself— no housecoat, a nearly unbuttoned blue shirt, no bowtie. 

There is a bed and a similarly damasked patterned blanket to the one downstairs, a veritable mountain of pillows.

“Why don’t you lie down?” Aziraphale asks, seemingly more at ease at the idea of being a good host. “Get comfortable?”

“Okay,” he says. “Yeah. Comfortable.”

And it _is_ — for all Aziraphale does not use his bed to sleep in the mattress is surprisingly plush, the blankets are remarkably soft.

“Do you mind if I…?” Aziraphale settles in next to him, hands outstretched and waiting.

“Sure,” Crowley says, a little breathlessly. “Whatever you want.”

“If— if it’s too much I can try wearing gloves,” Aziraphale says, looking fretful. “You know, to see if it helps.”

“To _‘handle an antiquity’_ you mean,” Crowley recalls, and bites down on his smile.

“You _are_ six-thousand years old.”

“I _knew_ that was a jab at—”

Aziraphale lays three fingers on Crowley’s arm for the briefest moment, near the interior joint of the elbow. The result is a string of vowels and the chewed off end of a moan. Heat courses through him, centers between his thighs.

“I would _never_ ,” Aziraphale says primly. “I don’t make _jabs_.”

“Sure,” he wheezes, feeling a bit undignified. “Whatever helps you sleep at night.”

“I don’t sleep,” Aziraphale sniffs.

“Shame about this bed then. Not getting much use.”

Aziraphale looks down at him and then away, smoothing a hand across the duvet.

“You are very welcome to use it,” he says. “Any time you wish.”

Crowley blinks at him and bites his tongue, wants desperately to ask what that means— what _any_ of this has ever meant. He has spent millennia walking along the edge of flirtation and friendly banter, never quite sure which side he would fall on when Aziraphale inevitably opened his mouth.

He sucks his lip in between his teeth and considers asking Aziraphale if he knows what they’re doing— if this is sexual or improperly friendly or literally just for science. The answer to which might break Crowley’s heart entirely in half but would not prevent him from seeing it through to the end.

“Where else should I— what should I do?” Aziraphale asks, seeming suddenly so uncertain.

“Whatever you want,” Crowley says honestly. “ _Anything_.”

Aziraphale twists his hands together and stares down at him, looking perhaps for marks from previous touches. And then he reaches out, hesitates. His palm hovers over Crowley’s chest, above his heart, and then touches lightly down.

He cannot hold back the moan that rips out of him, the unbidden verbal reaction to the holy fire that has been pumped into his bloodstream. There is a moment of arrhythmia— his heart missing a beat— and then it works overtime, beating too fast to catch up.

The hand pulls back and he looks blearily down at his chest, at the fine red ghost of Aziraphale’s handprint.

“ _Heavens_ ,” Aziraphale breathes. “It really does leave a mark.”

“Holy fuck.”

Crowley arches and twists into the bed. Grateful in some small corner of his brain for his too-tight trousers, that at the very least they are managing to strap his erection down against his leg.

“Please do it again. Something. Anything.”

He is seemingly past the point of pride, of caring, of _cool_.

Aziraphale hesitates considerably less this time and Crowley counts it as a victory, watches with hitched breath as a single finger slides from sternum to navel.

The reaction of a single finger is a delayed one, a pouring of gasoline and the breathless second before a match touches down.

The hand pulls back. The line down his center glows red.

“Oh fuck, angel _please_ for the love of someone don’t stop.”

“It hurts you,” he murmurs, eyebrows threading together. “I really am leaving… _marks_.”

“Yes,” he squeezes out, his eyes slamming closed. He reaches down and attempts to hide the unholy bulge in his trousers. “That’s what I want.”

“I don’t understand,” Aziraphale says softly, and Crowley peels his eyes open to find those blessed, holy hands hovering over the naked skin of his belly, uncertain. “How can you enjoy this?”

“Because,” Crowley says, nearly out of breath. “I enjoy _you_.”

“Me,” he repeats.

“Yes. _You_. All of you.” He shifts on the blanket, forces himself to look Aziraphale in the eye. “Your ridiculous clothes and your stupid fluffy hair. Your dumb angel tea cups. Those absurd fucking phrases you say. Do you know I would pay actual money to watch you eat cake in every restaurant on earth I don’t understand how you don’t—“

He cannot speak because there are those perfect, incomparable lips pressing fervently to his own, an upturned nose bumping into his. It takes a handful of milliseconds for the contact to reach his brain— and then it is as if an electric current has been pumped into his blood-stream, white-hot and dizzyingly, agonizingly brilliant. He gasps and cries out and immediately regrets it because Aziraphale is pulling back, clapping a hand over his mouth and looking horrified.

Crowley is fairly certain his lips are swollen, is pretty sure his cheeks are red.

“I’m sorry,” Aziraphale says, wide-eyed and shocked. “I shouldn’t have— I didn’t mean—”

“Do it again.”

Aziraphale reaches a hand out as if to touch Crowley’s now swollen lips and then thinks better of it, pulls it back.

“Really?”

“Yes.”

Aziraphale’s tongue comes out and slides across his bottom lip, leaves a trail of shine behind.

“You enjoy me,” he says. It is not a question.

“Only for about six thousand years now,” Crowley says. “Don’t let it go to your head.”

There are words for the thing between them, this strange current. Aziraphale, he knows, is probably aware of them in every language ever invented. But they have never said them to each other. Not quite.

And Crowley has never been certain of what brand of love it is that exists between them. Whether it is simple friendship or an affinity born of eons of time, the platonic admiration of a rival or actual romantic affection.

He knows only which one he hopes for, the one he has hoped for since the beginning.

“And I you,” Aziraphale says softly, his pupils blown wide open and Crowley can see straight through the black, gets held transfixed there.

“You do?”

“I do.”

He can feel blood creeping up into his ears, his heartbeat is probably visible from space.

“I was under the impression that trading bodies and offering to die for you would demonstrate the depths of my affection,” Aziraphale says, a bit stiffly. “ But perhaps it hadn’t.”

Crowley opens his mouth, closes it.

“You realize I offered the same thing, yes?”

Aziraphale purses his lips and very visibly swallows. Crowley can see him tongue idly at his teeth.

“So perhaps we should just—“ Aziraphale wiggles a bit, shifts his shoulders back and forth in his shirt, “—just come out and say it.”

Crowley feels suspended in time, an insect locked in amber. He stares frozen at Aziraphale’s throat, thinking suddenly of an exit plan— a place to run, somewhere to hide. Six thousand years of waiting for a moment and he isn’t sure he can handle it. The carbonated emotion in his chest has been shaken to an impossible frenzy and he feels ready to explode beneath the bottled energy of it.

Aziraphale sucks at his teeth and does a fantastic job of looking put-out, as though he had been expecting Crowley to crack first.

“I love you,” he says finally. “A rather unfortunate amount, really.”

Nothing has changed, he knows— they are still perfect opposites, they are still improbably matched. But the label punctures through the wall of his chest and releases a bit of that freneticism, injects him instead with warmth.

His voice gets caught in his throat.

“Holy shit.”

Aziraphale blinks at him, raises an eyebrow.

Crowley leans back and stares at the ceiling, feeling like he has just been dropped into the ocean.

“I confess that was not the reaction I expected,” Aziraphale says.

“Are we— you mean you actually—?”

“We are. I do.”

He makes an altogether undignified sound in his throat, closes his eyes because there is suddenly far too much liquid in them.

“I do too,” Crowley says breathlessly. “Love you. S’much.”

He is breathing too hard. He can’t seem to open his eyes.

“I want to— I want to touch you so badly,” Aziraphale says urgently, and Crowley forces his eyes open to see the tendons of Aziraphale’s neck standing visibly out in strain, the repeated swallowing of his throat.

“You can,” Crowley says, somewhat more desperately than he intended. “Please do.”

“Do— do my lips hurt?” Aziraphale asks quietly. “More than my hands?”

Crowley runs a fingertip along his bottom lip. The skin feels puffy and hot from their impromptu kiss.

“I think so,” he says.

“Maybe just a small kiss then?” Aziraphale breathes, sinking closer. “A tiny one.”

“Yeah,” Crowley says, suddenly breathless with Aziraphale so close. “Just a snack.”

A kiss gets placed very delicately into the corner of his mouth, a hand comes up and brushes softly at his jaw. It zips down into his bones, electrifies his skin.

He makes a pathetic sound into it and then Aziraphale pulls back, breathless and pink and lovely.

“I can’t believe it took us that long to say it,” Crowley murmurs, trying desperately to inhale a bit more of that angelic scent, darting a tongue over to lap up at the corner where Aziraphale had kissed.

“We probably should have said it sooner,” Aziraphale agrees, brushing a hand down Crowley’s naked arm and then yanking it back at the string of muffled profanity.

“Maybe you should put those on,” Crowley says, entirely out of breath, nodding at the gloves on the bedspread. “Pretty sure I won’t have any skin left if you don’t.”

“Yes yes,” Aziraphale agrees. “Quite right.”

The gloves, Crowley decides immediately, are not helping.

There is something pornographic about the stretch of them around Aziraphale’s thick wrists, the way the rubber spans from blue to nearly white around the girth of his fingers. He feels like an object, one of Aziraphale’s books perhaps, about to opened up and taken apart.

“ _Christ_ ,” He murmurs, and watches with equal parts trepidation and heat as Aziraphale’s palm hovers over his chest. “You touch _books_ with those things?”

“I do,” Aziraphale responds, puzzled.

“Lucky books,” Crowley mutters to himself.

There are fingertips hovering over his heart, curling into knuckles and sliding down his ribs.

“You really are,” Aziraphale starts, outlining Crowley’s bones with the barest touch of his fingers, “quite incredibly beautiful.”

His moan cracks itself in his throat, rises up broken out of his lips.

It’s a considerably muted heat— like the power of the sun but through a beach towel— perhaps enough for a burn but only after many incredible hours of persistent holding.

He throws his head back and into the pillows and submits to the touch, the praise, breathing himself through the rising reality that he might come in his trousers, untouched. He grinds the heel of his palm against himself and chews on his lip. There’s a sound in the room that sounds like a whimper and he realizes it’s coming from _himself_.

“What’re you—“ Aziraphale starts. “ _Oh_.”

Crowley keeps his eyes shut.

“Sorry,” he breathes, and shifts on the bed.

“No that’s— that’s quite alright I just did not— I didn’t realize—“

He forces his eyes open in a panic.

“I should’ve been… clearer,” Crowley manages. “When I said I liked it.”

Aziraphale glances at his hand cupped over himself, then to the steadily fading handprint on his chest.

“I had...” He shifts a bit, doesn’t quite meet Crowley’s eyes, “ _hoped_ that had been what you meant,” Aziraphale admits, a bit shy. “I only did not expect such an intense reaction.”

Crowley shifts and wriggles into the sheets, uncertain of where to look.

“Sorry,” he says again.

“Please don’t apologize,” Aziraphale says, and isn’t quite looking at him either.

His face feels like Aziraphale has had his hands all over it, he can feel the tips of his ears burning hot.

“You don’t mind?” Crowley asks.

“I don’t mind.”

He runs his tongue along his incisors, feeling piquant.

“How _much_ don’t you mind?”

The very corner of Aziraphale’s lip turns up in a smile and then he stifles it, but not before it reaches his eyes.

“It’s a negative integer, I believe.”

Crowley exhales shakily and flexes his jaw, tongues a bit at his swollen lip.

“Would it be a terrible idea to touch you?”

“Bit late for that,” Crowley teases.

“No I mean… _here_.”

A hand brushes down his torso, not touching, not quite— until it travels up over the edge of his trousers and lands softly down over the hard line of his cock, strapped down against his left leg.

Even through two layers of fabric and a latex glove he can feel a humming electric heat, just enough to tease.

“Oh— fucking— _no_ ,” he gasps out, and then chokes a bit as the hand pulls away. “No, _not_ a terrible idea.”

Aziraphale makes a shocked little noise in his throat and chews at his lip, slides his hand back over top of him.

“Oh _bloody fucking_ —“

The hand squeezes, runs up and down his length.

“—Someone, _Christ_.”

Crowley digs the heels of his palms up and into his eyes, tries to breathe around the feeling of Aziraphale’s hands on him, _finally_.

“May I take these off?”

There is a hand on his belt, a thumb rubbing against the fly of his jeans.

“Yeah, anything. _Anything_ ,” Crowley breathes, and fumbles at the clasps himself, their fingers brushing together.

He pauses for a moment and then looks over at Aziraphale next to him, legs folded up underneath of him and looking prim and impossibly naked even despite his near full set of clothes.

“Can I undress you?” He asks.

There is a sort of full body reaction— a straightening of Aziraphale’s shoulders, a tightening of the tendons in his throat. Crowley watches as he swallows and shifts and makes up his mind.

“If you’d like,” he finally says.

Crowley sits up immediately, ignoring his own clothes half open and falling down.

“ _If I’d like_ ,” Crowley repeats. “How can you be so clever and still say things like that?”

He lets his fingers hover over Aziraphale’s buttons. He desperately wants to kiss him again.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale says breathlessly, and Crowley does not know if he has ever been this close to the angel, minus their two brief and unplanned kisses. He freezes, feels like time has been suspended.

Up this close he can see the fine grain of his pale skin, the blue veins that emerge along his temple and then disappear again, only to reappear along his jaw. There are fine blond hairs between eye and brow, a certain lovely bit of line haloing his mouth from centuries of easy smiles.

He is _breathtaking_.

“Hallo, angel” Crowley says softly, uncertain of how to be, what to say. He bows his head between them and closes his eyes. “Is this too fast?”

Aziraphale smells like lavender and linen up close, like soap and sunshine.

“No,” Aziraphale breathes, at last. “Not too fast.”

Crowley opens his eyes and looks up, finds the upturned nose and the sea-glass eyes, the blond tips of his eyelashes. And then he leans in, presses a frantic and bruising kiss against those lips he has dreamed about for eons, ignores the increasing zing and high-pitched frequency that comes screaming up through his nerve endings.

He pulls back and bites down on the cry in his throat, decides all at once that Aziraphale should not be aware of how much that had hurt.

“No more of that, darling,” Aziraphale breathes, and Crowley can feel puffs of angelic exhales along his cheek, the lightest bumping of that nose up near his temple. “Later,” he says.

The abstract idea of a _later_ — that they will have time, again, _whenever_ to press their lips together fills him with a sort of alien warmth, an incandescent heat.

“Later,” he repeats.

He can feel Aziraphale pull back and watches as he unbuttons his waistcoat.

“Fuck,” Crowley breathes. “We’re doing this. We’re really doing this.”

Aziraphale looks up at him.

“Only if you’d like.”

“What kind of— of course _I’d like—_ only wait, no, let me do this.”

He stills Aziraphale’s hands and takes over on the buttons, carefully eases the waistcoat off his shoulders.

There is the loveliest of electric warmths emanating up off of Aziraphale’s body— even through clothing. A sharp hum that travels up Crowley’s fingers and down into his bones.

He gets the shirt off, then the trousers— is left with an angel in his underthings, sitting primly on a duvet. It is a surreal and impossibly lovely sight, one he had dreamed about for so long that it feels almost like a memory, a stunning full-body déjà vu.

“Now you,” Aziraphale murmurs, and those gloved hands push at his shoulders, gentle him back against the pillows. They move aside his unlatched belt, thumb open the button, slide down his zipper. It takes an effort on both their parts to peel them down off his legs, to pull off his shoes.

“I want you.”

The words fall out of his mouth.

“You’re _having_ me already,” Aziraphale says, gloved hands running up his sides and there are something like fireworks happening every time Crowley closes his eyes.

“You know what I mean,” he says, and swallows, digging his head back into the pillows and staring at the ceiling.

“I— I can’t.”

“You can,” Crowley insists. “If you want.”

“Of course I want,” Aziraphale says hotly, breathlessly. “But it would destroy you— I couldn’t.”

“Let me run out, get condoms. The gloves work,” Crowley says. “Sorta.”

“I _have_ condoms but you’d still— it’d be too dangerous.”

Crowley picks his head up and cocks an eyebrow.

“Why do you have condoms?”

Aziraphale is a bit pink around the ears.

“It makes it last longer,” he says shyly and clears his throat. “When I touch myself.”

Crowley blinks at him, his mouth is probably hanging open.

“You are the most… devastatingly indulgent thing I’ve ever met.”

Aziraphale purses his lips and looks primly down at him.

“I have had this body for over six-thousand years,” he sniffs. “I know what I like.”

“Believe me, angel,” Crowley says, leaning back and staring at the ceiling, “I’m _very_ glad you do.”

There are fingers along his ribs again, then up along his clavicles. It feels a bit like being studied, catalogued— and as those fingertips pump a voltaic river through his veins and up his neck Crowley has the increasingly hysterical thought maybe this is what Aziraphale had had in mind after all, when he’d invited him back to the shop.

A single gloved hand ghosts down his torso, following that previously inflicted roadmap of inflamed skin. It floats torturously over the hard line of his cock, pressed up into his belly and leaking.

“Please,” Crowley says, utterly out of breath and feeling taken completely apart— an exploded diagram of what a demon should look like.

“Tell me,” Aziraphale says softly, “if it’s too much.”

He is nodding frantically and digging his fingers into the blankets beneath him, lest he reach up and take hold of Aziraphale’s arm, guide his hand himself.

There is the lightest of touches, a slight and pleasant heat— and then thick fingers wrap around him, a palm touches down, he _squeezes_.

It is an instantaneous and instinctive reaction— an arch of the shoulders, his chest lifting off the bed. His eyes close, his muscles grip. There is a sustained and pathetic sound rising up out of his mouth that he is incapable of stopping, his hips flexing up, down, in an unending flux of seeking pleasure, chasing pain.

The hand releases him and he collapses into the pillows, like a body that had been animated only through a now absent electrical current. A puppet without its strings.

“Don’t stop.”

Aziraphale is breathing heavily above him and when Crowley pries his eyes open it’s to see a rather impressive tenting of Aziraphale’s white underwear, an asymmetrical and obvious moisture stain.

“Was it okay?” Aziraphale looks ever so slightly panicked, eyes wide and his hand suspending itself mid-air.

“Yes, except for— you know,” Crowley clears his throat and tries to swallow, “that you _stopped_.”

“It’s good?”

“It’s very good.”

“It still hurts,” Aziraphale says, and it still isn’t a question.

“In the best way.”

Crowley reaches for him, lets his hand float over the milky stretch of exposed angelic thigh. There is a faint vibrating hum that he can feel beneath his hand, as if there is a thunderstorm perpetually brewing beneath Aziraphale’s skin.

“This ok?” He asks, looking up into his face.

There is a frantic look, an audible swallow. And then Aziraphale nods.

Crowley steels himself and then leans in, sliding his hand up that pale thigh and savoring the millions of minute electrical shocks that arc through his hand and up into his arm.

And then there is clothing in between them again, a cotton barrier than lets his hand drift up and onto the straining sex between his legs with a surprisingly small amount of pain.

He squeezes. There is a sound that comes out of Aziraphale’s mouth that is not quite a moan— it is instead a breathless exhale, a sound cresting in his throat that is soft and gentle and fills in all the delicate canyons of Crowley’s ears, flows like water down his neck.

“ _Christ_ , angel,” he murmurs, rubbing his thumb into that growing slick stain. It feels surreal even as Crowley has him in his hand, even as he can feel the weight of him, feel the heat of him. Six thousand years of practice imagining this scenario and none of them had come close.

He wants to kiss him again, lie down next to him and tangle their limbs together until it is no longer possible to determine where one stops, the other begins. Press every inch of themselves together and let Aziraphale burn off his badness, distill him down to absolute purity.

“Love you, _love you_.”

He cannot stop saying it.

Aziraphale shivers, grips desperately at the bed.

“Please,” Crowley says, out of breath and out of care. “I want you.”

Those sea-glass eyes open dazedly, blink down at him. A tongue comes out and wets his lips.

“We’ve waited long enough,” he says softly, nearly a whisper.

He watches Aziraphale flex his jaw, listens to him breathe hard through his nose. His eyes flick over to the small table by the bed and then back to Crowley as if he is measuring the contents of each.

Crowley submits to it, spread out and naked and begging beneath his gloved hands. And it goes against everything in him to do it— to ask for permission, to wait and to plead and to go _slow_. A small part of him, the part that whispers his demonic integrities over and over again into the back of his head rebels against it, burns itself out.

He blinks and wonders if maybe that’s what has been lessening the burn of Aziraphale’s touches all these years. The waiting. The going slow. The pleading.

Or maybe, he thinks, watching as Aziraphale leans in to the idea of giving and taking pleasure, for himself, for another— reaching for lubricant in the drawer and certain square foil packet— the culprit is his demonic influence rubbing off a bit of that angelic shine.

Aziraphale pops the cap on the bottle and flicks his eyes up, asking for permission, again. Crowley can only nod, helplessly, feeling that perhaps they are like two stones tumbling in an ocean, polishing each other smooth.

There is a shuffle and a move to kneel between his legs, a delicate shucking of the rest of his clothes.

“You’re sure?” Aziraphale is asking, peering up at him from between Crowley’s knees.

“The most sure,” Crowley says.

“If it’s too much—“

“—I know. I’ll tell you.”

The lubricant makes an unfortunate sound as it squeezes out, but Crowley can’t find himself caring much at all because he is suddenly presented with the arresting sight of Aziraphale kneeling naked between his legs, one gloved finger extended, a line of clear jelly balanced on top of it.

He can think only of toothpaste on a toothbrush— that he is about to be scrubbed clean.

There are gloved fingers touching softly behind his balls, sliding down, and Crowley has the taste of a chemical burn in his mouth, biting down hard on his cheek to stifle his reaction.

“Ready?”

A single wet finger presses against him, rubs a tiny circle.

He nods desperately, breathing heavily through his nose and trying to ignore the fact that every time he blinks he sees stars.

The finger presses in and he can’t help the way his heels dig into the bed, the sound that gets ripped out of his lungs. It’s like freezer-burn on an open wound. An electric shock pumped directly into an open mouth. A full systemic battery of molten current that seems to trace through his bloodstream, open up his capillaries.

 _He deserves it_.

The thought seems to uncoil somewhere in the base of his spine and rise up through him like a ghost. It haunts the valves of his heart. It expands to reside in his throat.

It hurts because he deserves it, he thinks wildly, muscles shivering, heart pounding. Because Aziraphale— just Aziraphale— is too _soft_ , too _sweet_ , too _gentle,_ too _good_. It is not that Crowley _desires_ sharp things, strong things, _terrifying_ things—his desire for Aziraphale clearly negated that notion— only that he deserves them.

“Darling,” Aziraphale says softly, his hand stilling. “You do not seem to be enjoying this.”

Maybe, _later_ , he thinks— and there will be a later, he reminds himself— whenever it is in their jointed future that Aziraphale’s touch does not cause this taste like an electrical storm in his mouth, maybe that will point to his having risen up out of hell. That enough exposure therapy will burn off whatever it is that demands this sacrifice. And until then, he reasons, he might as well enjoy it.

“I am,” he gasps. “Don’t you dare stop.”

He manages to catch his breath just in time to lose it again at the sight of Aziraphale’s hands, gloved and slicked and moving between his legs.

“Okay?”

Crowley nods and reaches down between them, palms his own cock, desirous of an undiluted pleasure to chase the pain, clear his head.

“What does it feel like?” Aziraphale asks.

Crowley glances down at him, kneeling between his thighs.

“F-feels like licking a battery,” he manages. “But at the other end.”

“How do you know what licking a battery feels like?” Aziraphale asks, his finger pulling out, smearing more lubricant, pushing back in.

“Demonic— _ah_ — curiosity.”

“You’re incorrigible, my dear,” Aziraphale says with utter fondness.

“Fuck. Angel,” he bites out, his head swimming and he has the dim, flickering realization that he probably isn’t getting enough oxygen to his brain. He can feel the pain rapidly transmuting itself into a familiar pleasurable arc. “M’not gonna last.”

There is the taste of ozone in the back of his throat, like a lightning strike has touched down all around him and as such every hair on his body stands itself on electrified end, his nerves _sing_.

“Just a bit more, darling,” Aziraphale soothes, and another finger presses softly inside. He can feel his own pulse against them, can’t tell if the burn is from the stretch or from Aziraphale through archival-grade latex gloves. “I don’t want to hurt you,” he starts, and then sees perhaps Crowley opening his mouth to argue. “Not like this,” he shushes.

“I— I’m— Aziraphale,” he pants out. “M’really— I’m really gonna— _mmm, ah,_ embarrass— myself.”

“ _Never_ ,” Aziraphale says, and his hand twists, those fingers pull out, stretch back in. “You could never.”

Crowley digs his fingers into the duvet, throws his head back into the pillows, body arching up tight.

“I’d never—“ Aziraphale pauses and huffs out what sounds like a surprisingly strained breath, as if under the tide of a particularly strong emotional reaction himself, “— _never_ judge you in bed.”

“ _Fuck_ — that’s— _not_ helping,” he grinds out, and bites down hard on his lower lip, eyes blinking rapidly. Those fingers leave him. He feels shockingly cold in their absence.

“Are you ready for me?”

He experiences a full body shiver at Aziraphale’s voice.

“Only since forever,” he breathes.

The condom gets ripped open, applied and rolled down. There’s more lubricant than Crowley thinks is strictly necessary.

“I’ll try to— to stay back,” Aziraphale says. “And if it’s too much or hurts too bad please just—“

“—Angel.”

Aziraphale looks… _terrified_. Hungry and desperate and also held achingly tight. A bow string about to snap.

“Angel, it’s fine. _Please_. I’ll tell you.” 

He nods tightly in response, his throat working, swallowing, staring down between Crowley’s legs and he spreads them a little further open, lays himself out bare.

“Yeah,” Crowley encourages. “Come on.”

The first touch of him seems to fizz but only ever just— Aziraphale holding himself still and watching Crowley with a shockingly single-minded protectiveness. His heart feels like it’s been injected with helium.

“I’m serious,” Crowley squeezes out, and there is a fine shiver quaking through seemingly every muscle in anticipation. “If I make it more than five seconds you should buy me a drink.”

“And what if it’s less than that?” Aziraphale teases, somehow ignoring the fact that there is the very lubricated tip of his condom-sheathed cock wedged up against him.

Crowley huffs out a laugh and then gasps as it the action presses Aziraphale ever so slightly into him. The contact zips through him.

“Fuck. In that case— I’ll buy _you_ the whole bloody bar.”

There is a breathy sort of laugh and then Aziraphale is shifting on his heels, his downy knees kissing briefly at the backs of Crowley’s thighs and making his skin tingle ever so faintly at the touch.

“In that case— I won’t keep count,” Aziraphale breathes, and then pushes inside him.

Even through the too-much lubricant and latex condom it’s nearly unbearable— a full body cacophony of seizing muscles and a taste like a thunderstorm in the back of his throat, curled up in his sinuses. It feels like an injection of direct electrical current, a complete override of his body systems to the point where he imagines or perhaps actually _does_ hear the faint high buzzing frequency of ethereal instruments. Angel trumpets. Harps.

He is vaguely aware of Aziraphale pulling ever so slightly out, then back in, touching only at where they join and in those narrow straits of hip and accidental thigh; Crowley’s hands digging desperately into the backs of his own knees and holding himself open, letting himself get split apart.

“Oh, _Crowley_.”

He thinks he hears Aziraphale saying his name but isn’t entirely sure if he is actually hearing it on this earth or on some other celestial plane of existence. He can’t seem to inhale. He can’t seem to make words with his throat. There is the ghost of a gloved hand across his cock, a suggestion that leaves an arc of lightning across his skin and the sound of his name in Aziraphale’s mouth again and then he’s _there_ , his muscles gripping in a paralytic choke so intense it borders on seizing. A loop of pain circling around onto itself until it becomes pleasure. A completed circuit.

He has the vague impression of being seen by more than one pair of eyes, a heat that fills him from the inside and comes spilling out from every part of him, his pores weeping sweat, tears leaking out of the corners of his eyes. It blanks out his senses until there is no touch, no pain, no _anything_ — just a stretch of nothing. His eyes slip closed and there is no black, only _white_. Endless. _Sublime_.

“Darling.”

He can hear a voice but only just.

“Crowley, _please_.”

There are still those damned harps playing, ringing in his ears.

“Oh, darling I knew this was a bad idea— please wake up—“

He is fairly certain he is on a cloud in the firmament.

“ _Please_ , Crowley.”

It takes a considerable amount of effort to open his eyes, for his vision to clear. He blinks hazily a few times and finds that he is lying in Aziraphale’s bedroom, in his flat above the shop. The bedsheets beneath him are soaked with rapidly cooling sweat.

“Oh thank someone, Crowley I was so worried—“

“Whahappened?” He manages.

“I think you fainted.”

He coughs a bit.

“Did you come?”

He can feel more than see Aziraphale move back away from him.

“Well, I… I _did_ but I did not know that you had passed out I’m—“

“I _missed_ it?”

“I’m afraid so.”

He stares sightlessly at the ceiling. He can feel the press of Aziraphale’s fuzzy thigh up against his own and belatedly realizes that there is no pain. No electric shock. No salt rubbed into a wound.

He blinks.

“Well that’s interesting,” he mumbles to himself.

“What is?” Aziraphale asks, sounding altogether rather sleepy.

 _Later_ , he thinks to himself, and blinks up at the ceiling, warmth rising up in his chest. They have a multitude of _laters_.

He smiles.

“Do you owe me a drink,” Crowley starts, feeling spectacularly drunk and boneless and wonderful and not too entirely put-out, despite having missed Aziraphale’s orgasm. There will be time enough for that, he muses, and can’t help but grin dazedly. “Or do I owe you the whole bar?”

That remarkable kind of rare shocked smile Aziraphale has comes creeping out, there are darkened corners in the edges of his grin that he is very visibly trying to stifle.

“I don’t believe we owe each other anything,” he says, but it sounds a lot like _I love you_.

“On the contrary, angel,” Crowley says hazily, and he smiles up at the heavens, feeling lifted up out of his body, jubilant. “I’m pretty sure we owe each other everything.”

**Author's Note:**

> I have no idea how successful I was at any of this but it was fun! hope you enjoyed :D


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